Lists and Stories

How Many of the Signers of the U.S. Constitution Were Enslavers? There does not appear to be a consensus on the number of men who signed the U.S. Constitution—or, more broadly, were delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787—and who were also enslavers. According to the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History, “about 25” delegates enslaved people,...
How Many People Actually Got Lobotomized? Today lobotomy is a horror story. Less than a century ago it was a revolutionary “fix” for misunderstood mental health problems. The first lobotomies were performed in the late 1880s by Swiss physician Gottlieb Burkhardt, a supervisor of an asylum looking for ways to subdue overactive patients....
How Many People Have Been to the Moon? Even if you weren’t alive for the first Moon landing on July 20, 1969, you’ve probably seen footage of it, when astronaut Neil Armstrong famously declared, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” and Buzz Aldrin helped him plant an American flag on the lunar surface. And...
How Many People Signed the U.S. Constitution? Of the 70 delegates chosen as representatives to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, only 55 actually attended the proceedings in Philadelphia, and it is believed that there were never more than 46 of them in attendance at any one time. When it came time to affix their signatures to the...
How Mike the Chicken Survived Without a Head On September 10, 1945, Lloyd Olsen was beheading chickens for market on his family farm in Fruita, Colorado, when one of the decapitated birds picked itself up and started running around the yard, still very much alive. Olsen put the chicken, which he named Mike, in a box on the porch and was...
How Much Does Earth’s Atmosphere Weigh? In 1798 British physicist Henry Cavendish became the first person to accurately determine the mass of Earth. His painstakingly conducted experiment calculated the density of Earth and thus the value of G, the universal gravitational constant first proposed by Isaac Newton in 1687. While mass and...
How Much Trash Is In Space? Space seems pretty empty. After all, much of the volume of the universe is a vacuum that will kill you. But humanity hasn’t taken only memories and left only footprints on the final frontier. We’ve left a lot of junk up there. In Earth’s orbit itself, the U.S. Space Surveillance Network is tracking...
How Much Water Should a Person Drink in a Day? The popular recommendation to drink 8 cups of water every day isn’t as definitive as it may seem. The amount of water one should drink depends on a number of factors, including age, biological sex, and activity level. On average, women need to consume about 11 cups (2.7 liters) of water (the U.S....
How Old Is Niagara Falls? Niagara Falls, the iconic waterfall at the border of Ontario, Canada, and New York state, is fairly young, as waterfalls go. It began to form more than 12,000 years ago, toward the end of the Wisconsin Glacial Stage. The deluge of the melting ice from the retreating glaciers carved into the rock...
How One Shrimp Used Its Survival Skills to Become Both Best-Selling Pet and Astronaut A few years after humans first went to the Moon, Sea-Monkeys joined them. Let’s get the disappointment out of the way first: Sea-Monkeys, despite advertising that may suggest otherwise, aren’t aquatic primates. They’re actually brine shrimp—small crustaceans in the order Anostraca that inhabit...
How Other Species Learn In the wild, animals don’t live and learn. They learn and live. Knowledge equals survival. Certain knowledge is innate, such as a beaver’s instinctual understanding of how to build a dam or a bird’s to fly. But most knowledge must be learned. Like humans, the majority of species learn by observing...
How Radioactive Isotopes are Used in Medicine Radioactive isotopes, or radioisotopes, are species of chemical elements that are produced through the natural decay of atoms. Exposure to radiation generally is considered harmful to the human body, but radioisotopes are highly valuable in medicine, particularly in the diagnosis and treatment of...
How Rye Bread May Have Caused the Salem Witch Trials In 1692 the small Puritan village of Salem, Massachusetts, was plagued by a sudden and brief cloud of witchcraft accusations. After young girls Betty Parris and Abigail Williams exhibited severe convulsions and other strange symptoms, village doctor William Griggs diagnosed them as having been...
How Secret Is Top Secret? In an era of hacks, leaks, whistle-blowers, and media organizations that appear to have become information launderers for Russian intelligence agencies, it is important to understand what a state secret really is. It is equally important to recognize that this definition transcends political...
How Service Animals Help Humans Live Fuller Lives An earlier version of this article was published on the Britannica blog Advocacy for Animals. The partnership between humans and animals dates back to the first domestication of animals in the Stone Age, as long as 9,000 years ago. But never have animals provided such dedicated and particular help...
How Texas Rose The History Channel’s miniseries Texas Rising, which aired in 2015, brought to the screen the larger-than-life characters and events that contributed to the founding of Texas. Appropriate for a state where everything is said to be bigger, there is much more to the story behind the Texas Revolution...
How the Border Between the United States and Mexico Was Established Despite the acceptance by many Americans in the 1840s of the concept of Manifest Destiny—that it was the providential right of the United States to expand to the Pacific Ocean—the future boundary between the United States and Mexico was anything but a foregone conclusion. Great Britain, with whom...
How the Dred Scott Decision Affected the U.S. Election of 1860 The Dred Scott decision of 1857 put a match to the tinderbox of sectional conflict over the future of slavery, the most important issue in the mid-19th century United States. It exploded the hard-won rules under which the expansion of the United States had been undertaken over the previous four or...
How the First Surviving Quintuplets Became a Tourist Attraction On May 28, 1934, a miracle happened. In a modest farmhouse in Corbeil, Ontario, Canada, parents Oliva and Elzire Dionne welcomed five additions to their family: Yvonne, Annette, Cécile, Émilie, and Marie. Soon they would become the first known set of quintuplets to survive infancy. Their novelty...
How the Symbolism of the Swastika Was Ruined The earliest known use of the swastika symbol—an equilateral cross with arms bent to the right at 90° angles—was discovered carved on a 15,000-year-old ivory figurine of a bird made from mammoth tusk. The ancient engraving is hypothesized to have been used for fertility and health purposes, the...